AP FACT CHECK: Rhetoric from Trump, Biden in the non-debate
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden faced inquisitive voters on separate stages in different cities Thursday night in a substitute for the debate that was meant to be.
Here’s how some of the rhetoric compared with the facts in the prime-time events and a day of campaigning:
ECONOMY
TRUMP, answering questions in Miami on NBC: “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country.”
THE FACTS: The numbers show it wasn’t the greatest in U.S. history.
Did the U.S. have the most jobs on record before the pandemic? Sure, the population had grown. The 3.5% unemployment rate before the recession was at a half-century low, but the percentage of people working or searching for jobs was still below a 2000 peak.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer looked at Trump’s economic growth record this month. Growth under Trump averaged 2.48% annually before the pandemic, only slightly better than the 2.41% gains achieved during
Barack Obama’s second term. By contrast, the economic expansion that began in 1982 during Ronald Reagan’s presidency averaged 4.2% a year.
So Trump is wrong.
ELECTION FRAUD
TRUMP: “When I see thousands of ballots dumped in a garbage can and they happen to have my name on it? I’m not happy about it.” — from Miami.
THE FACTS: Nobody has seen that. Contrary to Trump’s repeated, baseless attacks on voting security, voting and election fraud is vanishingly rare. No cases involving thousands of ballots dumped in the trash have been reported in this election.
Trump has cited a case of military ballots marked for him being thrown in the trash in Pennsylvania as evidence of a possible plot to steal the election. But he leaves out the details: County election officials say that the seven ballots, along with two unopened ones, were accidentally tossed in an elections office in a Republicancontrolled county by a single contract worker and that authorities were swiftly called.
The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.
In the five states that regularly send ballots to all voters, there have been no major cases of fraud or difficulty counting the votes.
CRIME
BIDEN, answering questions in Philadelphia on ABC: “The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences, except for two things, it had three strikes and you’re out, which I voted against in the crime bill.”
THE FACTS: That’s misleading. He is understating the impact of the bill and the influence he brought to bear in getting it passed into law.
Biden wrote and voted for that sweeping 1994 crime bill, which included money for more prisons, authorized the federal death penalty and called for a mandatory life sentence for three-time violent offenders – the socalled three strikes provision.
He did call the threestrikes rule “wacko” at one point, even as he was helping to write the bill. Whatever his reservations about certain provisions, he ultimately voted for the legislation, which included the three- strikes rule and has come to be seen in the Black Lives Matter era as a heavyhanded and discriminatory tool of the justice system.